On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 12:58 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/12/2010, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
I've had similar thoughts, but more general, thinking that the internet in general has more potential for people to "waste their time" than ever before. How many scientific theorems and great books and works of art are going to be left undone because people are wasting their time on Wikipedia
I argue precisely the opposite. How many scientific theorems and great books and works of art are going to happen that wouldn't otherwise because we open source lots of information from closed source articles?
A lot of the articles are based on summarising information culled from paid-for sources. These sources are not generally available to people outside certain closed groups of people, at least, not without paying money, and except for recent works, who ever does that?
Agreed. But I would still urge students (later years of secondary school and at university) to not let Wikipedia and other user-edited sites overwhelm them. They should get the balance right between the various aspects of the information resources available to them, and engage in a mix of contributing, learning, and creating.
Carcharoth